Peter Crouch’s rise from mockery in the Championship to the Premier League, England, and a resoundingly successful media career is chronicled in a documentary released this summer – although some of the hardest truths come not from the man himself.
Instead they are spoken by his father Bruce, 64, who is the most compelling voice away from Peter in the Amazon Prime show, and the only person who truly knows his son’s career inside out. It is Bruce who rejects the simple narrative of an unusually tall footballer making it against the odds. For him the height was not the key issue, instead it was much more delicate than that.
How can the required mentality be instilled if – as in the case of the young Peter – it was not naturally occurring? How does a promising child footballer graduate to become a professional? How much should a parent push a child in elite sport?
Bruce is straightforward about the main shortcoming Peter, 42, carried as an affable teenager from Ealing, west London. “Too nice” was the verdict from Bruce, and his son agrees. In due course Peter became a 42-cap, 22-goal England international and a member of the Premier League goalscorers’ 100-club. Addressing how that is accomplished is not necessarily the fairy tale as is often presented.
In its review of “That Peter Crouch Film”, The Guardian wondered if Bruce was the “villain of the piece.”
“[A] Hyper-competitive dad who, it transpires, was one of those parents who gets into fights on the touchline of kids’ games.” The only reason there was the odd confrontation was when it got nasty over his son’s appearance or claims he was not the age he said he was.
Indeed, for Bruce himself it was simply a question of trying to help his son fulfil a dream. “If he had gaps in his armoury,” he tells Telegraph Sport. “I knew I could help.”
We have known each other a long time, from the days when Bruce was the only parent of an England player travelling to games who would share his views on the football journalism of the day – complimentary or otherwise. His part in Peter’s success is undeniable, as Peter himself has acknowledged. “I thank my dad every day for what he did for me,” Crouch junior said in an interview with The Athletic.
For Bruce, who had a successful career himself as an advertising executive, there is now a second cycle. Three of his grandchildren – his daughter Sarah’s two boys and one girl – are keen footballers and 23 years on since Peter’s professional debut as a 19-year-old at Queens Park Rangers, Bruce finds himself coaching and helping in junior football again.
“With Peter it was hard – thinking, am I being too harsh or am I helping him achieve his dreams?” Bruce says. “You don’t know how hard to push him without affecting the relationship. Am I pushing too hard? Am I being enough of a dad?”
Bruce was open with his son about how hard it would be to make it as a player. The pair worked for hours on his touch, using the skills programme developed by the Dutch coaching pioneer Wiel Coerver. But there was also what Bruce describes as the “philosophical element”: how Peter adapted to the Darwinian nature of football.
“Listen to Pete articulate it now, the penny has dropped,” Bruce says. “He will say ‘I understand why my dad was like that because I’m like that with my own kids – because I want them to do well’. I was worried how people would react [to the documentary released last month]. In fact I have had a lot of really supportive messages from people, even those saying ‘I wish my dad had pushed and supported me like that. You helped him achieve what he wanted to do.’”
The famous story in Crouch family lore is Bruce leaving a young Peter to make his own way from training with his Tottenham youth team at the old indoor pitch at White Hart Lane after jumping out of a tackle. But as he got older that changed. In that Athletic interview, Peter describes a moment as a teenager when he told his dad he was planning to go to a party the night before a big game for Spurs’ youth side. Rather than stop him going, Bruce asked whether Peter thought that was what other players on both sides would be doing pre-match. Peter changed his mind.
As a grandparent, Bruce is quite happy not to be making the big decisions for the next Crouch generation. Even so, the garden in south-west London has been converted to synthetic grass and the Coerver manuals are being consulted anew. The three local grandchildren pop round when they want a session. The big question for Bruce and his wife Jayne, young parents in their time, is whether they could go through it all again with their grandchildren.
“It’s their mum and dad’s decision,” he says, “but the answer is ‘No’. I wouldn’t want it for my grandchildren. It is every dad’s dream but I wouldn’t want them to go through it. It’s not worth it. The money is not worth it. The achievement [of being a professional footballer] is great but what you have to do in this day and age to get there is not worth it.
“The big downside is the external pressure. Social media, the hangers-on and the moral corruption money brings. So many things around football make it unattractive. I still love the game and the children do too, and I would support them if that was what they wanted … but for a lot of kids these days there is a financial pressure. When Pete was growing up the archetypal bad football parent was the one living their own football fantasy vicariously through their kid. Now the bad football parent is saying: ‘I’m going to push the kid because I’m going to make money out of it.’
“It wasn’t like that in Pete’s day [as a junior footballer]. You knew that if they did well, they would earn money. Now the pressure is on a young player to get his family out of the situation they are in.”
As one of those who have completed football parenthood, Bruce finds himself sought out by a new generation of parents wrestling with the same questions. The unsung heroes that Bruce encountered as a football parent were, he says, often not the fathers. Instead they were single mothers who had managed to support their son to a point where he could make it through the academy system to a professional contract.
Now he advises those who seek him out to take the same route he plotted for Peter who never signed for a club until he joined Spurs at 14. Before then he trained with Brentford, QPR and accepted a few invitations to be ball-boy at Stamford Bridge – although he never signed for Chelsea, despite it being the club he and Bruce supported.
Peter moved from QPR to Spurs only because Gerry Francis had previously gone that way as a manager and taken with him QPR’s best youth team coach, Des Bulpin. It took a move back to QPR to get a first-team chance. “Parents should use the club, not the other way around,” Bruce says. “If they want you, they will always want you.”
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